An Invisible Sign of My Own

by Aimee Bender

  I did not remind myself that only two years before I had written a ballad about mallards on my walk to school, about how those feathers held the empress’s hidden emeralds, so she could always get money if she needed it.

  My father managed to go to work every day, to the blue glass hospital where he cured people of skin disease. To his office he wore dark blazers over dull shirts over tweed pants. His watchband was silver; his wedding ring, white gold. His thick black hair now had stripes of age in it, and his eye whites were thin as skim milk. I had to go see him at work once because I needed an itch cream for my knuckles, which were so overknocked they’d broken out, and when I entered his office, he was standing by his secretary. She was a woman who believed strongly in the powers of herbal tea and singing. She wore a dress the color of cranberry juice and sported huge earrings shaped like birdcages that held inside them miniature plastic parrots. I was struck, held still at the door, by the contrast.

  I waved to the secretary, who handed me a lollipop even though I was too old then; it was grape, a purple circle. I unwrapped it and popped it into my mouth. The secretary offered the bowl of lollipops to my father, as a joke. To both of our surprise, he reached in and fished around.

  Aha! he said, when he pulled out his choice.

  It would’ve made sense to laugh but it just wasn’t funny. He’d selected the only black licorice lollipop left over from the last batch that’d had patients complaining. He ripped off the plastic and held it up in his hand. I could feel the secretary trying to get eye contact with me, birdcages swinging, but I wouldn’t look over. I didn’t want to know the expression on her face.

  5

  That hospital where my father worked was the one true attraction in town. Everything else was very regular—we had a town hall, a library, one high school, a park. A butcher, a baker, an auto shop, an ice-cream store. All the buildings were one story high, and one story out loud. At the tourist agency, smack in the center of the park, in the center of town, my mother kept her people informed by busily making brochures called History of the Bug Shop or Evolution of Our Gas Station. There was also a record of everyone who had ever left town and where they were now. Supposedly Molly Glee, who I’d gone to high school with, was currently in Sweden, making boats. I thought this was a big load of bull. My personal feeling was that there was a whole lot of lying that went on about where people were once they left. No one wanted to admit their kid had ridden off into that glorious western sunset only to sell insurance in another small town in the middle of another nowhere.

  But even if it was true. Everything was eclipsed anyway, by the clear blue shadows of that hospital.

  Its architecture would’ve been ornate anywhere, but especially in such a small town. Some very wealthy, slowly dying architect from the South had come many years before and built it entirely of blue glass, hoping to heal himself with the dry climate, and also to make life for the local sick people more beautiful. The hospital was twelve stories high, the biggest building in town by far. The clear-cut blue-glass elevator was so thick it made the world look like liquid, and since there was no body of water around for miles, this was the closest you could get to swimming.

  A month or so after he finished his masterpiece, the architect died, in a transparent blue room he designed himself, top floor, doing his best to replicate heaven.

  My mother remembered the whole thing. She’d been just a teenager when the architect had come to town. She often told me about watching truck after truck drive in from the highway and head straight to the empty dirt lot, truck beds loaded with walls of blue glass—thick, clear panes of hardened sky. The hospital took seven years to build. My mother said the process was wonderful, from frame to completion, and as the walls and windows shot higher and higher, blue shadows large as swimming pools on the pavement, the whole town watched in awe from below.

  On the day of the grand opening, in fact, Mr. George O’Mazzi, a war veteran, future father of biceped Danny, slammed his arm deliberately in a car door because he wanted the distinction of being the first to sleep overnight in the new blue palace. The brand-new ambulance spun down the street, jaunty and clean, red light awhirl. Mr. O’Mazzi’s plan failed miserably, however, because although the exterior was in great shape, there was very little equipment and even fewer doctors inside the hospital at the time, so he spent hours in terrible pain before those trucks pulled in from the highway again, this time piled high with drugs.

  When asked the following week by my blue-eyed mother just exactly what it was like to sleep in there, for the brochure on History of the Hospital, he stared at her. Like spending the night inside your eyeball, he said. Except imagine a needle poking right through the pupil.

  She blinked.

  Unfortunately, his injured arm, already weak and damaged from shrapnel, got infected from the car-door slam, and had to be removed. After his recovery, Mr. O’Mazzi brought the separated arm to the town glassmaker, who sealed it inside a rectangle of the same blue glass, for proud display on their mantel, engraved with the words FIRST SURGERY.

  Word of the hospital’s beauty spread, and attracted doctors from all over the country. Some came to town, balked at the size of the population, and left; but others, like my father, were soothed by the climate and sense of space, and stayed. He was glad to get away from his side of the country, a place so cold in wintertime that bullies went after scarves instead of lunch money.

  My mother and father met right away because he was new and wanted to get connected and she was the best-informed resident. He explained to her how he fixed hives and halted acne; she told him how the town had saved the old oak tree on Maiden Lane from blight. Their first kiss was by the duck pond when the very first ducklings had been dropped off, by some traveler from a city of excess birds.

  They held their wedding in the park, ducklings now ducks, and invited whoever wanted to come. The wedding album looks like a town fair. My mother reminds me of a dove, her skirts lifting and rustling off the page, a bow-shaped smile on her face. The hospital looms in the background, shimmering blue as an upright pond on a bright sunlit summer afternoon.

  That first year my father got sick, my parents told me over dinner that we weren’t taking a vacation that year. We’d had a plan to go down a river in a boat.

  Your father is uncomfortable leaving his doctors, my mother explained, twisting the end of her napkin into a spear.

  But the doctors say nothing, I said.

  My mother pointed her paper spear at me and jabbed at the air with it. True, she said.

  Well I don’t care, I said immediately. I looked over to my father for approval, but he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking out the window at something else. After cleaning up, I went into my bedroom and took out my homework, and when I heard them walk into other rooms and settle down, I thought: well, the truth is, vacations are pointless anyway, because you always have to come back, so you might as well just save time, skip the middle step, and stay put in the first place.

  My mother sat in the living room, alone. I heard her shift the books around, sighing a bit. She didn’t know yet that from now on, we would be roping ourselves in by the borders of the town because my father worried he might die out in the open somewhere.

  I would like to die on my own soil, he told my mother after the fifth year of making no plans to leave, even for an afternoon.

  Oh, you’re not going to die, she’d answered, flat. And besides, she said. This isn’t even your own soil.

  When my father spoke, his voice was gentle.

  If you want, Judy, my father said, you can go by yourself. You can bring a camera and show me photos.

  She’d seemed unmoved throughout the conversation but that’s when I heard her voice crack in half.

  But I want to go with you, she said.

  It was the youngest I ever heard her sound.

  That first night of not leaving, my mother called to me from her post in the living room. I was nestled in my bedroom, math textbook open
in my lap, cross-legged on the bed. Mona, she called out, pick a page! What do you mean? I garbled, chewing on the side of a yellow pencil. Just pick, she said. I looked down at the page I was on: Dividing Fractions. I pulled the pencil from my teeth. Page 68, I called out. She made a paper flipping sound and then I heard her laugh. Kentucky, she announced, pick another. I made 68 into a fraction: 6/8 and slimmed it down: ¾ 34, I called out. 34! Flip flip flip. Chile! she said. What are you doing? I asked, and she said: More pages, give me more! I checked my sheet of answers and picked out numbers. 33. 12? 27! Oh, she said, such good choices, she said. Would you rather see Paris or Hawaii? Paris! I yelled back. Paris! No wait, I said, Hawaii! Dark blue ocean and volcanoes. Hawaii! I hollered. Page 100, I suggested. There were more page-flipping sounds. Oooh, my mother said, oooh. What? I asked, emerging from my room. My mother was curled up on the formerly burgundy sofa and had, in her lap, the huge hardbacked brown atlas we’d bought for a buck at the Finch’s garage sale. She held up the map to me, Page 100. Corsica, she said. Now that must be incredible. Orange blossoms and sharp cliffs and lasagna too.

  I tucked myself up on the sofa next to my mother. Show me, I said.

  She outlined the borders of the island. The Tyrrhenian Sea, she said, doesn’t that sound great? Tyr-rhe-ni-an. She released the word slowly, letting the back of her hand glide over my hair, knuckles combing my scalp. Let’s go tomorrow, she said.

  I pulled closer. Where’s Japan? I asked.

  We’ll make it a world tour, my mother said. First, Tokyo. Then Nepal. Uruguay. How about Morocco? She flipped the pages fast and countries blurred by in calm pastels. She pointed out Casablanca.

  My father wandered past the couch, saw the book open, walked out.

  We’re just pretending, I told him.

  My mother was taking her finger on a tour of Italy. I just know I would love Italy, she was saying.

  Where are we? I asked. Daddy, I called again, we’re finding us now.

  He was in their bedroom. That’s good, he said, voice small through the hallway.

  My mother thumbed to the table of contents. Page 45, she said, opening up. She skated her index finger down the gloss of the page, gliding past town names, a riverbed far away, searching, skiing, until her nail rested, clear, over a nest of pink and green lines and a black dot. Here, she said.

  I peered down. There, I said. We’re in that dot, I said.

  We both bent close to the page, heads touching. I see you, I told her.

  I’m winking, she said. Look closer. She even tilted her head to the ceiling and winked at it and I laughed, breathing in the smell of her shoulder—dish soap and almond moisturizer.

  We looked up my aunt’s home state, Colorado, and we looked up India and imagined all the people there. Millions, I said, finger on Calcutta, there are millions of people inside this dot. We looked at Kenya and pictured giraffes, sleeping. We looked at New Zealand and imagined sheep, chewing. After Peru, my mother closed the book.

  I’m tired now, she said. Enough of that.

  She handed the atlas over and I held it close; it was so big and broad I could barely get my arms around the whole thing. Maybe, I said, if I shake it—

  She looked at me, standing, ready to go away. Good night Mona Blue, she said, leaving her palm on my head for one second.

  I pushed up against it. If I shake it just right, I said, maybe we’ll fall to the next page.

  She smiled, kind of sadly.

  Shake hard, she told me.

  Removing her hand, she left the room and went to bed. I rattled the atlas like it was a bottle of juice, separated into water and pulp; I integrated that atlas. I shook hard, counted to ten, and opened to 45. Then turned the page to 46. Which put us in Australia.

  Just like that! I said, out loud, to the quiet house. I put my finger smack in the middle of the continent, pinning it down.

  People only notice if you leave; they don’t notice if you stay. It’s like hearing a buzz only after it’s been turned off. My family spent every minute of every day in town and my father turned daylight on constellations of itchy red dots and his face was the color of wet worms and we told no one that anything was wrong. No one asked, either. I had instructions if they did. About a month or so after the first sick scare, my parents had specifically sat me down and asked me to please keep this between us.

  I’d said: Keep what? What is this? What do you mean when you say THIS?

  But my father had just coughed. My mother thumbed through a magazine. There was no name to say. The dictionary was not helpful. The encyclopedia was useless. Under gray in the thesaurus, all it said was drab. Under gray in the doctor’s reference book, all it said was Gray’s Anatomy, excellent resource text. Under gray in the phone book, all it said was us.

  I went to my room and thought their plan of privacy was absurd and would never work but I found out fast that I was wrong. No one ever asked my father if anything was the matter. No one asked about his foggy pallor and no one came over with a casserole. No one took me under their wing to say, Mona are you okay? or talk about me in nice sad voices behind my back. Our fake-out was totally convincing.

  Welcome back to school. My summer vacation was fine.

  Which is why, when Lisa ran out of my classroom that Friday with the big I.V. crown on her head, before I went to recess duty, I had to go stand in a bathroom stall by myself. I stood, trembling inside the four small walls, because Lisa was so proud with the truth, she was a billboard and a megaphone, she’d made jewelry of saline and plastic, and I was thickly, fiercely, jealous.

  6

  The science teacher had moved here from a different state, one with big lakes and factories. He was new at the school too. We were the two new teachers. Apparently science teachers were equally hard to find—he was the son of the boss’s college roommate, and he’d assembled all the factory items he could stand, and then drove out of his city in a truck. His name was Mr. Smith, but he didn’t look like a Mr. Smith—it was an interesting name for him since his features were un-Smithlike, large and drooping, the features of harsh winters and heavy-duty politics.

  He got in trouble right away, because he did an experiment where he split his groups of students and told half the class to talk to their houseplants kindly and the other half to talk to them abusively, cussing and insulting the plant, to see if tone and content made any difference in levels of growth. The kids assigned to cuss were thrilled beyond belief until Mimi Lunelle’s mother found her daughter telling the bathroom fern it was a shame on the family’s name and to fucking go to bed thirsty. Where did you learn to speak like that?! she demanded, horrified, and Mimi shrugged and then flicked the feathery leaves of the fern hard with her fingernails. Bitch, she said to the roots. She was sent straight to bed. Mrs. Lunelle called up the big boss. The science teacher was talked to, at length—first by boss, then by parents—and the experiment was halted. He was relegated to simpler projects involving salt crystals and build-your-own-atom kits.

  I figured he was the school’s problem teacher. I myself had had an excellent first week of teaching. I had it down. I was queen and countess. I was turning twenty in a week, and at nineteen felt I was the winner of the worldwide teaching contest, secretly judged behind closet doors and one-way mirrors.

  The beginning of my unraveling started with that science teacher, on a Friday afternoon. Earlier in the day had been the first tricky Numbers and Materials we’d had so far, beginning with Elmer Gravlaki crawling out from under the table right before the bell rang with a 12 made of wood sitting atop the palm of his hand. It was cut perfectly to shape.

  When do I go? he asked.

  End of class, I told him. Hang on.

  After drills and workbooks, I called Elmer to the front. He was fidgety, but held his wooden 12 up high, running his hand over the slope of the 2.

  My dad is the address maker here, he said. He makes addresses. Elmer brought the 12 down to chest level. Nobody lives at this address, he said.

 
; The class watched. 12 − 0 = 12, he said. 12 − 1 = 11.

  Danny shot a rubber band at Elmer.

  Stop, Danny, I said.

  What? he said, eyes dewy brown at me. Danny had a big-time pushover mother.

  Up front, Elmer’s eyes were watering. 12 − 3 = 9, he quivered. Danny threw a button at his head. I was about to put Danny’s name up on the board when Elmer, voice wavering like a teakettle, said: Danny, stop. I know where you live.

  Danny’s forehead raised. You do not, he said. Elmer, clutching his 12, swallowed and came out with 144 Main Street. The wood 12 was tottering in his palm, but Danny, who had a paper clip all set to throw, suddenly put it down, hearing those numbers (apparently the right ones) that marked where he slept every night. I was impressed. This was a fine armor for Elmer.

  Well, where do YOU live? Ann DiLanno asked Elmer.

  We’re unlisted, he said, rubbing his palm over the 1.

  Squirming up at the chalkboard, he did a few more and then sat, standing the number on his desk so it looked like he lived there. I knocked on it when I walked by, and Elmer smiled happily, as if I were knocking on the door to his unlisted house. Little did he know.

  His presentation went very fast. Lisa said good job. He blushed, and then Ann DiLanno said she had one too.

  Okay, I said, well, I guess we can have two today since Elmer’s was so quick.

  Ann stood up, smiling kind of meanly, and walked to the chalkboard.

  Here, she said, throwing out her hands. A 3.

  The class was looking around, at her fingers, at the floor.

  I see no 3, said Lisa.

  It’s a 3 made of nothing, Ann said.